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Calculus Before Newton and Leibniz: Part I
by David Bressoud
AP Calculus
Macalester College
St. Paul, Minnesota
"Along with Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Leibniz is generally credited as one of the
inventors or discoverers of calculus."
-- Thomas P. Dick and Charles M. Patton, Calculus.
History has a way of focusing credit for any invention or discovery on one or two
individuals in one time and place. The truth is not as neat. Most of the time, this doesn't
matter, but in calculus, it does. When we convey the impression that Newton and
Leibniz created calculus out of whole cloth, we do our students a disservice. We
present mathematicians as creatures of an entirely different level of mental ability.
Newton and Leibniz were brilliant, but not even they were capable of inventing or
discovering calculus.
We also miss out on some great stories. The body of mathematics we know as
calculus developed over many centuries in many different parts of the world, not just
western Europe but also ancient Greece, the Middle East, India, China, and Japan.
Newton and Leibniz drew on a vastbody of knowledge about topics in both differential
and integral calculus. The subject would continue to evolve and develop long after their
deaths. What marks Newton and Leibniz is that they were to the first to state,
understand, and effectively use the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Use it effectively
they certainly did. No two people have moved our understanding of calculus as far or as
fast. But the problems that we study in calculus -- areas and volumes, related rates,
position/velocity/acceleration, infinite series, differential equations -- had been solved
before Newton or Leibniz was born.
The expression of these solutions was awkward and progress was painfully slow. It
took some 1,250 years to move from the integral of a quadratic to that of a fourth degree
polynomial. But awareness of this struggle can be a useful reminder for us. The grand
sweeping results that solve so many problems so easily (integration of a polynomial
being a prime example) hide a long conceptual struggle. When we jump too fast to the
magical algorithm, when we fail to acknowledge the effort that went into its creation, we
risk dragging our students past that conceptual understanding.
This article is the first in a series of articles that will explore the history of calculus
before Newton and Leibniz: the people, problems, and places that are part of the rich
story of calculus.
Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (also known by the Latinized form of his name:
Alhazen) was one of the great Arab mathematicians. He was born in Basra, Persia, now
in southeastern Iraq. Sometime after 996, he moved to Cairo, Egypt where he became
associated with the University of Al-Azhar, founded in 970. He was prolific, writing over
90 books, and is most famous for his work in astronomy and optics. His interest in
mathematics ranged over algebra, geometry, and number theory. I focus on him
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because he is the first person I know of to have integrated a fourth-degree polynomial.
Of course, he did not express it quite that way. Around 250 B.C., Archimedes wrote On
Conoids and Spheroids, a book that, among other things, demonstrated how to find the
volume of a parabaloid, the solid of revolution that you get when you rotate a parabola
around its axis (see Figure 1). In particular, if a and b are positive constants and we
take the region bounded above by the graph of the parabola below by the x-axis, and to
the right by x = a (see Figure 2), and rotate this region around the x-axis, we get the
solid of revolution whose volume is
.
In other words, the volume is exactly half that of the cylinder that you get if you rotate the
rectangle of length a and height b around the x-axis.
Figure 1: The parabaloid.
The difficult part of this calculation, something that it took a mathematician of
Archimedes' stature to realize, is that the problem of finding the volume of a parabaloid
can be reduced to that of finding the area under a straight line (the
integral of x from 0 to a).
In the Arab world of the tenth century, Archimedes' On Conoids and Spheroids was
unknown, but Thabit ibn Qurra of southern Turkey and Abu Sahl al-Kuhi of northern Iran
had discovered their own proofs of the volume of a parabaloid. Ibn al-Haytham read
their work and asked himself the question: What if we rotate
this region around the line x = a instead of the x-axis?
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Figure 3: Rotating the region around the line x = a.
The result is the very Islamic-looking dome shown in Figure 3. Ibn al-Haytham showed
that its volume is 8/15ths of the volume of the cylinder that you get when you rotate the
rectangle of length a and height b around x = a. In the notation of modern calculus, the
calculation of this volume becomes
But ibn al-Haytham lived almost 700 years before the formulas for integrals would be
known. He found the volume by stacking disks. If we slice the dome into nv disks, each
of thickness b/n, then the ith disk from the bottom has radius a - ai2 /n2 and volume
(b/n) p (a - ai2 /n2 )2 (see Figure 4). The total volume of this stack of disks is
.
All that's left is to find a formula -- in terms of n -- for the summation. We then see what
happens as n approaches infinity. We expand the summand and pull out the constant
powers of n:
.
Figure 4: The horizontal slice across the dome.
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For ibn al-Haytham as for mathematicians around the Mediterranean, through the
Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, the problem of calculating areas and volumes
came down to the problem of finding sums of powers of consecutive integers. Ibn alHaytham was one of many mathematicians in many different places who succeeded in
solving this problem. He showed that:
The volume of the dome is:
How did he find this summation? That's another story; one that I'll tell next time. It spans
over two thousand years and three continents.
Sources:
1. Dick, Thomas P. and Charles M. Patton. Calculus. PWS Publishing, 1995.
2. Katz, Victor J. "Ideas of Calculus in Islam and India"; Mathematics Magazine, 1995.
(68-3). 163-174.
3. Katz, Victor J. A History of Mathematics: An Introduction. 2nd edition.
HarperCollins, 1998.
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